Mordant Core

Wednesday, 11 March 2009

I fit out a Jaguar after posting that post last night and headed back into the wormhole I found (I had a probe launcher with me this time, just incase, I spent about 45million isk on that ship).

That shot is the Alarm Clock getting pounded by a Sleeper battleship.

With that one little ship, I was able to take on 4 cruisers. I killed 2 of them and that spawned 3 more frigates and a battleship. So all at once, all on my own this time, I was taking on 6 sleeper ships, plus 2 turrets. Sure I had to warp out a couple of times just to be safe, but I had it under control.

Everywhere I look, I'm seeing people telling of how they got totally owned by Sleepers here and there. Sure, I started off in hi-sec so my spawn is an easier one, but still...

I got a lot of cool loot, and even went back for a salvage ship to hoover up all the leavings - I've started training for reverse engineering too so I can see if I can get some Phat Lewt from all the goodies I found.

I think a lot of people have fallen into the old newbie trap of "Must fly biggest badest thing possible into wormhole", my trusty Jaguar does the job brilliantly, I just need to tweak it a little more - shield booster goes on in place of the second multispec hardener (which I can't really perma-run anyway) to minimise the downtime on warpouts!

Tuesday, 10 March 2009

I was a bit cheeky today and downloaded the patch whilst I was at work, installed it all and was ready to go when I got home this afternoon.

All my probes had been converted to Core Probes, so I loaded up my CovOps and set out to see what I could find!

I was in empire space, because that's where I was when I logged off and I figured I'd have the most chance of killing stuff if I started in easier systems!

After about an hour, I found my first site - it was a salvage profession site and I didn't get a whole lot from it about half an hour later though, I got an 'unknown' hit and got very excited.

It took me about 20 minutes to scan down the wormhole - at one point I somehow had 4 probes at 0.25AU, all getting a 100% hit each, they must have all just had an edge on without actually overlapping! crazy!

Finally though, I got the magical green dot and I warped on in

I really like some of the new effects they've added and wormholes have to be the most impressive

Well I didn't come all this way to look at pretty swirls, so of course I hopped on through

I didn't bother dropping any probes and just used the onboard scanner - found 2 'plexes and warped in cloaked

2 frigates, 3 cruisers and 2 turrets. Not gonna get very far launching probes at them, let's go grab a shooty ship and see how we do!

I didn't really plan ahead properly so I only had a crap shield fit Rifter from some work I was doing a few months ago. Off we went - I was joined by a corpmate in an Arbitrator.

I warped in first to test the water and took out one of the frigates on my own - didn't take too much damage at first but they started to chip away at my shields eventually so I warped out then warped back in with my bud. With one frigate down, the second fell pretty quickly and then most of what was left was struggling to hit me. I'm pretty confident that with a few tweaks, the Mordant Core will have a whale of a time in these low-level 'plexes.

After we killed everything but the turrets (they were really hard to kill!), a second wave of 5 cruisers warped in and my corpie's Arby was getting a bit beat up.

We warped out with a handful of interesting bits and pieces, worth about 500k each to NPC buy orders. I didn't get a chance to salvage so I'm not sure what kind of stuff these little rats have to offer.

All in all, a very successful first foray into Sleeper territory and I really enjoyed all the probing to find it. I am liking Apocrypha so far!

Friday, 6 March 2009

I've been very busy, both in RL and in EVE. I've hardly played this week at all, but last week things moved on quite a bit:

I now have an Orca at my disposal - my industry alt can fly one and I bought a shiny new one Euclidean. I haven't actually used it for much yet, but flying it around with a load of ships loaded onboard is way cool.

I'm working on building my cash reserves back up and with my main combat dude I've decided to spend some time 'Ving up', stuff like Surgical Strike and Navigation always nice to get the last few percent of whatever it is.

I put a POS up for my corp a couple of weeks back, didn't get a chance to post about it, but it looks like we might have to take it back down at some point soon, so I'll probably write about that - all depends on whether or not our CEO logs in any time soon...

I just had to repost something I thought was pretty awesome in the latest Dev blog:

So when you enter a wormhole system and see something ‘unusual' off your port bow, proceed with the knowledge that some of the things you know about how your ship performs may no longer be true. Your ship drives may push you faster, your weapons may hit harder, you may find yourself with no shields or less effective armor... and just when you think you've got it all figured out, things may change again!

I'm thinking I'll just find myself a w-space system and live there, I wonder if it's possible to be completely self-sufficient in there, ice? asteroids? I hope so.

Wednesday, 11 February 2009

I can be a little OCD about numbers - volume on the TV has to be an even number or multiple of 5. 27 is a no-no, 26 is better, 25 (assuming I can still hear it) is best.

so the patch notes cause me some trouble:

2499 new solar systems are now accessible through the emergence of mysterious wormholes throughout New Eden. These celestial gateways open doors to lucrative new opportunities for the bold and wary traveler.

2499?! Why 2499? What happened to the 2500th system, is there a secret Dev party there that we're just not invited to? I NEDE TO KNOEW!1!one1"!

My play hours over the last week and a half have been a bit unusual, and as such, I haven't quite found the time to post anything.

Monday and Tuesday last week brought snow to my part of the world and with schools being the first to close (I'm a teacher), I was given the gift of 2 solid days of EVE Online. I spent most of that time mining in null-sec whilst chaining a spawn of juicy battleships.

In related news, I broke the 700million isk mark at the week end!

I also decided to have a look around the test server. It was all really quite straightforward, copied the EVE installation directory into a new directory, applied the test patch and away I go. Then came the waiting.

It seems my character was last mirrored about 2 months ago, so I was short about 1million skillpoints and a few corporation roles. I wanted to play around with putting up a POS you see.

So first I had to renounce the roles I did have with the corp, then wait 24 hours.Then I discovered that you can only launch a POS on behalf of a corporation, not yourself, so I had to fly into empire space, set up a 1-man corporation and then fly back to where I'd already bought all the modules!

Eventually though, I spent an interesting few hours anchoring and onlining various structures. Bizarrely I actually enjoyed doing it, made me think seriously about setting up my own POS somewhere - until I realised that the fact that test-server is not only mostly empty, and the no non-consensual PvP rules in effect made it all seem much easier than it would likely be in the 'real' world.

The opening action on our part regarding the exploit included the total destruction of all the POS complexes involved. This entailed flying to each one and basically nuking everything in sight - a fireworks show of epic proportions but with no witnesses except the GMs in the demolition team.

I mean, surely they could have just opened up a link to the database and just deleted all the various entries associated with the exploited POSs, but instead a strike force of GMs was assembled and sent off to destroy them the old fashioned way. How cool is that?!

GMs must have a fairly rough time of it, so this must have been a fantastic little party to be part of!